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Jan. 26, 2007
So familiar yet so different
Jews can now worship at leisure in the Ukrainian city of Kiev.
GRIGORI KHASKIN
After 16 years of self-imposed exile in the wilderness of Port
Moody and Coquitlam, I finally paid a visit to Kiev, the city of
my birth, where I suffered for 33 years through an unbelievably
good childhood, great university years and not so perfect, as we
all now know, communist rule. Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine,
had more than a thousand years of Jewish history, which mostly ended
with the onset of communism and the Second World War.
It was an interesting experience to walk childhood streets and parks,
to show my wife my family's former apartment, stolen by the government
when we emigrated, which now houses an office. It was fascinating
to see newly rebuilt cathedrals that were previously blown up, one
at a time, by peace-loving comrades.
One of the highlights of the trip was Yom Kippur, which I spent
in Kiev, in not one, but two, synagogues. For Kol Nidre, I attended
the old synagogue on the Podol, the neighborhood on the shore of
the Dniper River, which remained standing even during Soviet times.
Throughout my blessed youth, that synagogue was more or less out
of bounds for a lot of secular Jews, who would have immediately
risked their employment by attending it because the building was
always under the friendly watchful eye of the KGB. My family, for
example, safely stayed at home during all Jewish holidays. We even
imported matzot for Passover from my uncle, who lived in the much
more liberal, at that time, city of Tashkent, lest we expose ourselves
by buying matzot at the only available place in Kiev – the
very same synagogue.
So I never saw the inside of the shul before this year. It was nice
and warm there. There were lots of people, half of them English
speaking, including the rebbe, with his airfield-sized flat beaver
hat. There were all kinds of hats there – Lubavitch style,
yarmulkes, of course, and Russian furazhka, immortalized
in the movie Fiddler on the Roof (Tevye wears one).
I met a Jewish professor there, now living in Germany, who had returned
to see the city for the first time in two decades. I met Israelis,
who could not speak English or Russian or, for that matter, Ukrainian.
The liturgy of Kol Nidre was a little puzzling and it took me several
minutes to come to terms with the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the
Hebrew prayers, which differ from my learned-in-Canada version.
The next day, I was in the other shul: the Great Brodsky Synagogue
in downtown Kiev, a mere three blocks away from my former home.
The synagogue is named after one of Ukraine's most prominent Jews
of the late 1800s, Lazar Brodsky, who made a fortune in the sugar
trade. In contrast with the old official synagogue, I had attended
it as a child many, many happy times. Our elementary school often
arranged field trips there. I remember that we kids sat looking
to the direction of where the ark should be, watching wonderful
puppet shows. Yes, a 100-year-old shul, under the rule of our atheist
comrades, the self-proclaimed "engineers of human destiny,"
had been converted into a puppet theatre. This was the value placed
on a formerly great building, which could instead have been demolished.
It is not often that one sits in a former puppet theatre on Yom
Kippur, having near déjà-vu seeing somehow familiar
rooms and stairwells. Obviously, there were some big improvements
since the good old days: a magnificent ark, bimah, menorah, airport-style
metal detector at the former foyer entrance and security guards
everywhere - memories of an attack on the synagogue almost two years
ago in December 2004 are still fresh in people's minds. A nice Jewish
boy who I knew long ago, who was almost a destitute person 16 years
ago, but is now a successful businessman, accompanied me to the
synagogue and surrendered at the entrance, to receptive hands in
the cloakroom, his lovely new Beretta pistol, which he carries with
him at all times. His absolutely stunning, beautiful daughter, who
I remember as a rowdy 10-year-old, surrendered her handgun, as well.
I do not think I should describe here the service, which I believe
is pretty much the same everywhere, even in Coquitlam. But at the
end of that day, I would say that it was worth it to have gone to
the Great Brodsky Synagogue. I visited it one more time, just before
Sukkot, to take a couple of pictures inside, and then lunched in
the kosher establishment next door. Half a block from the synagogue,
on Rognedinskaia Street, now stands a small monument to the best-known
Jewish son of Kiev: Sholom Aleichem.
Many changes have occurred in Kiev in the last 16 years. There are
horrendous traffic jams, great food and fashion stores in the underground
malls. There has also been another development: the "orange
revolution" President Viktor Yushchenko, who last year lit
the chanukiyah in the Great Brodsky Synagogue as a guest of honor.
These days, he is trying to push through parliament a bill that
would give the rights and benefits of war veterans to the former
members of Ukrainian paramilitary and police units that collaborated
with Nazis during the Second World War. Some of these "warriors"
brag that there were three times more Ukrainian guards and police
than German SS murderers at Babiy Yar. They are still proud of it.
Grigori Khaskin is a professor at Simon Fraser University.
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